Change the Voice & Accent of Spoken Text Selection in iOS

The default voice for speaking text in iOS is the same voice as Siri, but if you want to switch it up and hear something different you can change the text-to-speech voice quite easily. Switching voices is a bit more fun than you’d expect though, at least with English, because you end up with different accents as well. To get use out of this you’ll first need text to speech enabled in iOS, you can do that along the way if you haven’t enabled it yet:

Open “Settings” app and tap “General” then “Accessibility”

Choose “Speak Selection” (turn it ON if you haven’t yet), then tap “Dialects”

Tap to choose your new voice and accent

To check what the new voice sounds like, switch over to any app with text, tap and hold on a word or phrase, then choose “Speak Selection” to hear the new voice.

If you want your iPhone or iPad to sound exceedingly proper, it doesn’t get much better than the British English voice of Daniel. I’ve always been a fan of Australian accents so I went with Australian English, but all voice choices are very high quality. Obviously changing back to the default Siri voice is just a matter of choosing your primary countries language.

8 Comments

I’ve tried this for a long time now. I’m an American, but I love the British accent. However, the only problem is that half of the time when you choose a different accent (for English) it does not work properly. It does not recognize the words or phrases properly.

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